Summary: Homily from the Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time. Mass Readings from October 10, 2010: 2 Kings 5:14-17 2 Timothy 2:8-13 Luke 17:11-19 How do these Mass Readings fit in with the homily? If you go back to the story of Namaan the Syrian and Elisha in the First Reading, Namaan expected Elisha to ask him to do something heroic, something huge, and he almost missed out on the great gift that Elisha actually gave him. Naaman had expected that Elisha, this man of God, would ask him to do something extreme, something extravagent, something way out there, and all Elisha asked Namaan to do was dip himself seven times in the Jordan waters. Namaan, looking at expectation, almost missed out on the gift that God had to give him. It can be the same way with us. When all we're doing is looking at expectation, what we expect to get, sometimes we miss out on the gift that God wants to give us. In the Gospel reading, those lepers were the perfect examples of people who experienced God's gift, God's grace, God's healing on that day. But it took one person, the Samaritan that Jesus praises, who recognizes the gift he was given. That's the lesson for us. If we don't recognize the gifts we are given, we can go through the rest of our lives and just be blessed and blessed and be given so many gifts, and not even take a time to stop, with intentional gratitude, and turn to God and tell God, "Thanks." This is one of the great gifts of the story that Luke gives us in his Gospel today, that we can be blessed and not even know it, not even recognize it. But here is the Samaritan that gives us a perfect example of someone who recognizes the gift that God has given him, stops, and is intentionally grateful, has intentional gratitude. That can be us.
